Such are these times, when the tares of the Devil are everywhere to be found. So great has been my grief at the state of the world of men as it hurtles towards the end times that I have been unable even to take up my pen; so painful the tears of compunction that I have scarce been able to see the paper. Yet write I must, and tell of how even the most powerful of men were brought low by their rashness. Now, the Queen of the Angles, Saxons, Britons, Picts, and Scots had several children. The eldest, Carolus Princeps Galliae, spoke to plants and was considered by many already to be in his dotage; the second, Anna Principessa Regia, was the most capable, a scourge of stuff and nonsense but now far removed from the succession; then came Prince Andreas, styled dux Eboracensis; and I think there was another one. Woe to the kingdom of the Angles and others, that this man, named for the great Apostle upon whose feast day I myself was born, should have brought such shame on the dynasty! In his youth, this Andreas had been known as the playboy prince for his many sinful dalliances, and his marriage to a flighty aristocrat had been dissolved to the great sorrow of his mother. And so he had been given a sinecure by which he travelled the lands of the earth ostensibly to represent the merchants and tradesmen of the kingdom, but in reality to keep him out of public view, for he was widely thought to be somewhat dull-witted.

Alas, in his wanderings Andreas fell in with the daughter of a Bohemian called Chrodobertus the Fat, owner of the chronicle known as Speculum Diurnale. This Chrodobertus had fallen from a galley into the ocean and floated off, never to be seen again. His daughter was at this time consorting with a man called Galfridus of Eppstein, who was a procurer of very young girls for the gratification of old men. He was a close friend of Donald, Dux of the Aremoricans, as I need hardly tell you, and had a deep interest in the mysterious cult of eugenics, because of course he did. Galfridus and Andreas became close friends and the prince frequently stayed at his house, where it was said great debaucheries took place. The lawmen of the North Aremoricans generally leave such rich white men undisturbed in their sinfulness, for such is the nature of North Aremorican Law, which is very strange. As it happened, though, by some miracle or administrative oversight, the cause of which I know not, they arrested Galfridus for his many disgusting crimes. He was brought before the judges of the land and hurried off to jail to await trial. There, shortly afterwards, he was found hanged. Some said he had hanged himself; others said he was killed to stop the details of his links to powerful people like the prince and the dux being exposed. None could decide the truth of this matter, which probably is known only to the Almighty, and all should pay no heed to the rumours of the common herd. That said, it all seemed a bit dodgy to me. At this point, various people came forward with questions and allegations about the Dux Eboracensis’ friendship with the dead procurer. It was said that the prince had had slept with a young girl at one of Galfridus’ parties, in London. So it came to pass that, in order, as he thought, to dispel these rumours, Andreas agreed to be interviewed by a wise woman from the British Board of Chroniclers or BBC. Contrary to the prince’s hopes, this interview turned out to be, as the commoners say, a bit of a cart-crash. In fact it was worse than that. It was as though two wagons drawn by elephants collided on top of a cliff and fell off into the sea, causing a great wave to carry a galley from the east into the middle of a coastal city, in turn bringing about an outbreak of plague and the Eutychean heresy. But let that be enough of tortuously extended similes. The prince attempted to answer the wise woman’s questions but his responses seemed only to make matters worse. Sometimes he appeared to think that his friendship with the wicked man had been but a minor error of judgement and that his crimes were mere peccadilloes, to the bemusement of the wise woman. At others he told the most absurd tales in order to deny the charges made against him. At one point he said that he could not have slept with the young girl because that very night he was attending a banquet of Italian bread-based delicacies in the town of Woking. This place Woking is, it is said, a most unlikely place to find a prince of the realm, especially this one. Its name means the settlement of the people of Woke, a legendary hero from many centuries ago famous for being in touch with his feminine side and ever-conscious of his own privilege. Be that as it may, this was a remarkable feat of recall for a prince who throughout the conversation repeatedly claimed to have no memory of all sorts of things. At another point he denied the young woman’s tale of how he was sweaty with a remarkable story of how, when he had once taken part in a war in a far-off island, he had come quite close to the fighting and as a result had not been able to sweat for many years thereafter. This must have been a miraculous occurrence for, of the many sad things that afflict warriors as a result of their experiences of battle, this inability to perspire seems to be quite unknown to the leeches and apothecaries. Such was the interveiew of the dux Eboracensis. As a result, he was lambasted across the chronicles of the land for a couple of weeks until they lost interest as the result of another event in the sad history of this dynasty, of which I will tell you later. The peoples of the Angles, Saxons, Britons, Picts, and Scots, however, came to think ill of the prince and, among many, his dynasty.